Monday, April 23, 2012

Today we drew the light bulb with charcoal again. However, there was an extra challenge; the sun was setting and the blinds were open. This meant that the shadows on the bulb were changing very quickly. Some improvisation was required.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

If you've read AREva, you know that I like tabletop RPGs. However, the reason I stopped writing it is because we stopped playing it. Why? Scheduling issues. This is the bane of any RPG, and it's the reason these characters never got the chance to be played. However, good characters should not go to waste. Even if I'll never get to play them, I hope that someone reading this might.

These characters were made for Eclipse Phase. It's a very strange setting that takes place ten years after the singularity- an event where technology advances so much it radically changes our nature. In Eclipse Phase, your body might be a suave-looking man, a sexy lady, a walking tank, even a cloud of nanomachines. Anything you have the money to buy.

My character in the game was based around the concept of forking- copying your mind into a new body. Whenever he goes to some place he hasn't been before, he somehow acquires a new body and forks his mind into it. The forked personality then connects to a network he has set up that lets him know where all of his kin are. This way, he knows if he already has family wherever he's going. The way this would've worked in-game is that whenever the party goes somewhere, the GM rolls a die to see if any of his kin are there. If so, the GM then rolls on a table of pre-made NPCs to see who the party might meet.

My friend's character was a bit less serious than mine, and is based pretty much entirely in gameplay, with no backstory. He had an affinity for cheap bodies, and stuck to them exclusively. This is because he went through them very quickly. His strategy in battle was to charge the enemy, attack until he's killed, and charge back in with a new body. In effect, a one man blitzkrieg. Our GM had nicknamed him "Kenny."

Even if I never get to experience these two, I hope someone else might be able to. As always, this post is under Creative Commons. So if this missive inspires you, feel free to run with it. Just be sure to credit me somewhere.